Recyclability by Material: Five Landscapes Under One Grade Scale

One scale, five landscapes. Glass and metal begin closest to the grades' top because their streams are mature, their materials tolerate their standard decorations, and their recycling loops are genuinely closed. Paper and board hold high grades while coatings and laminations respect the fibre stream's tolerances. Plastics divide sharply by format: rigid mono-materials can reach the top; flexibles and composites work for the middle; small and inseparable formats fall away. Wood is assessed within a logic that privileges reuse and repair, with recycling as the later cascade.

This guide reads each landscape for its grade risks and its at-scale outlook - the working map behind the station's more technical guides.

Glass's risks are decorative and mechanical: colours outside the standard palette reduce cullet value, ceramic and crystal-like elements contaminate, and inseparable closure systems deduct. Its at-scale position is the system's strongest, with container-glass collection and closed-loop remelting established across most of the Union and deposit systems reinforcing the beverage end. Metal's position is similar: steel and aluminium are detected and separated efficiently (magnetic and eddy-current), tolerate their lacquers, and command recyclate value that pulls collection. The design task in both is conservatorship - do not let a closure, a decoration or a composite accessory spend a position the material earned. Their guides' recurring sentence applies: the grade is lost in the accessories.

Paper grades defend fibre quality and yield. Wet-strength treatments, plastic laminations, heavy coatings and food-soiled fractions reduce either the yield of usable fibre or the grade of what emerges; repulpability testing is the category's native evidence. Beverage cartons sit in their own stream logic - fibre recovery with polymer and aluminium fractions handled by specialist capacity whose geography decides the at-scale story market by market. Board's design frontier is barrier: delivering grease and moisture resistance with coatings the pulping process can release or tolerate, at thicknesses the stream forgives. Every point of barrier over-engineering beyond the product's real need is paid for here.

Rigid plastics are the winnable game: mono-PET and mono-HDPE with disciplined labels reach the top grades, PP follows with separability attention, and the design variables are known and cheap at specification stage. Flexible plastics are the long project: mono-polyolefin structures improve yearly, high-barrier laminates remain the hard core, and the at-scale outcome depends on sorting and film-reprocessing investment that content mandates are designed to pull forward. Polystyrene and PVC sit at the landscape's difficult edge - the first for stream economics, the second for contamination chemistry - and ranges holding them should treat their assessments as strategy questions, not design tweaks. The plastic landscape, more than any other, rewards the portfolio view: winnable rigids fund the flexible transition.

Wood packaging's circularity runs repair-first: pallets and crates are reconditioned through established markets, cascaded through particleboard at end of life, and only then to energy. The grading framework accommodates that logic - including the lower at-scale benchmark the timeline station recorded - but wood is not thereby unregulated: substance duties touch treatments and coatings, transport reuse tiers count wood fleets, and the file must show the loop the units actually travel. Timber sourcing legality sits in neighbouring law (the deforestation regulation's due diligence for relevant products), a cross-reference wood-heavy businesses should hold explicitly rather than discover.

New product briefs increasingly put material choice itself on the table, and this landscape map is the briefing document for that conversation. The honest comparison is never material against material in the abstract - it is this product, with its barrier, shelf-life, logistics and brand facts, in each candidate material's stream reality across its actual markets. A material that grades A but fails shelf-life is not an A; a material that grades B and recycles at scale in every market it enters may be the strongest circular performer in the range. The regulation's architecture - grade plus at-scale plus content - was built to force exactly this three-dimensional reading. Use all three axes, in the brief, before the first prototype is commissioned.